Triathlon with a toddler!
This will be a somewhat different race report… for those with kiddies, you’ll hopefully appreciate it, for those without, you probably won’t understand it!!
I decided to do Midlands Ultra as a pre-race before Ironman… race weekend unfolded as follows:
I’m sure you’ve all heard of Air B & B? Well, we’ve put our house up for rent for a bit of extra cash (Kids cost a fortune!) and it so happened that the weekend we were going away was the weekend our house was rented out. Friday was therefore spent organising a gardener & Marvellous Maids to get our house semi decent before our guests arrived. Logan & Candice were taken to Kirstenbosch gardens for the morning when I realised that as the poor lady from Marvellous maids cleaned, so Logan just chucked yet another food item on the floor…and wherever Logan crawled a large army of ants and 3 jack russells followed!
I then needed to pack…. Logan’s stuff for the week including bottles, nappies, dummies, bibs, warm clothes, swimming clothes, smart clothes, toys, food etc! Mine & Kent’s clothes… I was forgetting something… oh crap – race kit & bike! We were going to KZN so that I could race!! I rushed to the nearest bike shop where I found an old bike box in the rubbish bins outside!
I now had a sparkling house and a toddler & 3 jack russells sitting on the grass outside wondering why they weren’t allowed back inside!
Now I have to retract my story slightly and tell you about 15 Ivy Lane. This is a gorgeous little house in Tokai and it happens to be Kent’s parents holiday house where they one day hope to retire. Everything is WHITE – the couch, the linen – EVERYTHING! All items are labelled, all keys are locked in a box which is locked in another box which is locked in a cupboard which is… locked! We knew that Kent’s mom would have a heart attack if we asked her if we could all go and stay the night so that our house was kept clean for our guests the next day… so we decided to keep it quiet and go anyway!
We arrived at this spotless perfect little house with 3 jack russells, a toddler, a bike & a whole heap of luggage for our trip to KZN for the week. Oh and I mustn’t forget our dear friend Freddie who baby sits my fur balls came along too!
Feeding a 1 year old is rather entertaining – especially my one who refuses to eat from a spoon so everything must be done on his own! I thought dinner was better left outside on the grass, so as I attempted to get Logan to eat, my 3 JR’s sat waiting patiently as Logan fed more food to them than into his mouth.
Logan then spent the next hour digging in the rose garden and tasting pebbles in the perfectly manicured garden while I chased after him putting the pebbles back and re planting the roses! If you could paint a picture in your mind of a toddler now covered in black sand, with the remains of chicken and veg on his t-shirt… you can understand why I was now desperate to put him in a bath. I then realised that the main bedroom was locked and so I had no access to a bath or any baby soap.
As I searched for the bedroom key I knew my mother in-law had outwitted me and there was no way I would find the bedroom door key. It was now 8pm and so I threw my child into the kitchen sink and he got bathed with nivea foaming face wash!
Every athlete knows that 2 nights before race day is your most important nights sleep… every mother knows that with a toddler that’s just not going to happen! At 1am Logan decided it was time to play. I eventually resorted to drugging him with panado syrup and Kent found a mattress which he moved into the lounge so “the athlete” could try and get a bit of sleep. I woke in the morning to find Kent sleeping half on and half off the mattress with Mr Logan grinning up at me sprawled across the mattress in a way that said “yip, parents – I own you!!”
Fred walked out of his room and looked at us “I am never having kids!!”
As we frantically packed up, I tried to remove all toddler & jack russell remains from the neat little house. We eventually made it to the airport after a quick pit stop at our place to fetch my cycle shoes!
Our plane flight was like a crèche! I have never seen so many kids under the age of 2 on one flight in my life before. If that had been “athlete-non mommy” me getting onto that plane 2 years ago I would have cried! After lots of food throwing & poo nappy changing in the teeny little airplane toilets, all 3 of us passed out in our seats until we landed.
We were needless to say quite relieved to hand Logan over to granny when we arrived in KZN. I could sort out my nutrition and Kent unpacked my bike ready for Midlands Ultra.
A fantastically organised event, it was an extremely tough route in 38degrees heat so athletes were dropping like flies. I had a solid race finishing 2nd.
It is great to be racing again, but as you can see our lives have somewhat changed with a “race report” that consists of 2 lines! The rest of the report is the chaos of the Horner household!
I don’t know how single mom’s do it because without Kent and our 2 grannies I would definitely be nowhere near a race. The rule is… Kent is on dad duty for 10 weeks before Ironman. I am IT after Ironman – let’s hope my darling little boy is sleeping for more than 3hrs once Ironman is done!!
